Weiner’s World—February 2017

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in February 2017 atwww.weiner-intl.comand is being reprinted here with special permission from the author.

IPC APEX EXPO 2017 was the best in five or more years. The 60th annual meeting drew a crowd. The meetings were good. The founding Director, Ray Pritchard, and the previous president, Denny McGuirk, came back to help celebrate. Ray greeted first timers and executives of the PCB and EMS Forums as well as the crowd of more than 500 at the Wednesday evening celebration. The mood was upbeat. There were reports of new orders from Asia as well as the Americas, and news of increasing business from the show floor. IPC membership was up in all its regions to more than 4,000.

Doug Pauls, principal materials and process engineer, Rockwell Collins, was honored with the IPC Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame Award. Gary Ferrari, FTG, well known and awarded leader in circuit board design circles, standards development, and a former TAEC chairman, received the Dieter Bergmann Fellowship Award. Gary named the University of Connecticut (UCONN) as the recipient of the Award’s scholarship. UCONN is a member of the public/private consortia NextFlex.

Cao Xi, technical director at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. was elected as a new Board of Directors member. He is the first from his country to hold this post. China now has more than 800 IPC members, greatly attributable to the work of Dr. Philip Carmichael, President of IPC China.

Additive manufacturing got a lot of attention at the show as did robotics. The BotFactory’s desktop Squink, hidden in a small booth with a price of just a “few” Gs, garnered a lot of attention. Founded in 2013, the company developed a variety of desktop models which can be used to print conductors, insulators, solder paste and a host of other items for prototyping or repair.

Jeff Timms, ASM’s Americas managing director enthusiastically stated that his booth had more than 750 visitors during the first two days! He also stated that business was improving. KohYoung’s booth ran countless demonstrations throughout the show. Dr. Koh, President and CEO, seemed pleased with the apparent upturn and outlook in America. Technica’s President FrankMedina enthusiastically demonstrated DEK’s new “affordable” printer.

The IPC’s programs for PCB members appeared to be re-energized. Mike Carano’s “Advanced PCB Troubleshooting” professional development course drew rave reviews. The PCB Executive Forum’s program provided valuable pertinent perspectives, information and advice to the industry executives that attended. The evening dinner with the EMS members provided an additional opportunity to exchange ideas across the supply chain.

The PCB Executive Forum also generated a mystery as to why not one of the 150+ non-IPC members, who frequently complain about there not being benefits for them in the organization, did not take advantage of the program and the special 75% discount for a one-year membership offered to Forum attendees.

There were considerable concerns voiced about potential supply chain issues due to the Dow-DuPont merger. Distributors and users alike wondered which company’s products would survive and how they would be delivered and serviced. The “electronics” sales of the two “giants” are estimated to be about $5 billion of the $80+ billion of total revenue. As a reminder, the result of the merger is expected to be three separate companies: an agriculture company, a material science company, and a specialty products company. The latter would house the electronics and electronics materials businesses.

Foxconn’s chief, Terry Gou, has refused to respond to reports of the company planning to open a large LCD panel factory in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The company said that issue remains under discussion.

Liu Guohong, director of the finance and modern industry research center at the Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute, said that it is unlikely to move its manufacturing to the U.S. in the short term, Liu said, as U.S. costs are still higher than in China.

Sakai Display Products Corp., a jointly managed company of Foxconn and Sharp Corp., will start construction of a new plant in March in Guangzhou, with an initial investment of $8.88 billion.

Foxconn also established a new research center in Shenzhen last month.

Intel continued to top all other chip companies in R&D expenditures in 2016 with spending that reached $12.7 billion and represented 22.4% of its semiconductor sales last year. Intel accounted for 36% of the top-10 R&D spending and about 23% of the $56.5 billion total worldwide semiconductor R&D expenditures in 2016, according to the 20th anniversary 2017 edition of The McClean Report that was released in January 2017. Figure 1 shows IC Insights’ ranking of the top semiconductor R&D spenders based on semiconductor manufacturers and fabless suppliers with $1 billion or more spent on R&D in 2016.

Intel’s R&D spending is huge and exceeded the combined R&D spending of the next three companies on the list.

Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi Inc. announced its first in-house designed chipset. The Surge S1, deployed in Xiaomi's newest smartphone the Mi 5c, is the first chipset—which manages data flow—from the company's wholly-owned chip research subsidiary, Beijing Pinecone Electronics.

Xiaomi was briefly the world's most valuable startup following its last round of fundraising in 2014. It has since seen sales tumble due to competition from the likes of Huawei Technologies, Vivo, and Oppo.

The in-house chipset is one of a number of projects which Xiaomi hopes will bring users to its ecosystem and lower costs. Other projects include smart home devices and online banking. The company said it started developing the chipset just over two years ago, and that it is competitive with chipsets in the same range from market leader Qualcomm Inc.

Xiaomi said it has been granted over 3,600 patents, almost half of which are international. The figure includes the 1,500 patents bought from Microsoft Corp. last year.

The 47th NEPCON JAPAN was held from Jan. 18−20, 2017. Its scale with 2,250+ exhibitors was the largest-ever. The show had 110,234* visitors, which is also the largest number in its history. (*Including concurrent shows for automotive technology*, smart factory, wearables*, etc.)

*Automotive World and the 4th Wearable Expo shows each claimed Said to be the world’s largest in their categories.

Share

During our walk-through of the GreenSource Fabrication facility with VP Alex Stepinski, he started the conversation on surface preparation and plating by saying, “We have Atotech horizontal production technology in place here. We’ve been running Atotech turnkey solutions for a while.

At electronica 2018, Mark Goodwin, chief operating officer at Ventec International Group, discusses the company’s marketing strategy along with their newly appointed technology ambassador, Alun Morgan, and how he sees the world.

The UK chapter of the global IMAPS community of electronics and microelectronic packaging engineers shared a wealth of knowledge and wisdom about PCB substrate technology trends, developments, and future requirements in a webinar on the first of November.

Printer Version

Weiner’s World—February 2017

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in February 2017 at www.weiner-intl.comand is being reprinted here with special permission from the author.

IPC APEX EXPO 2017 was the best in five or more years. The 60th annual meeting drew a crowd. The meetings were good. The founding Director, Ray Pritchard, and the previous president, Denny McGuirk, came back to help celebrate. Ray greeted first timers and executives of the PCB and EMS Forums as well as the crowd of more than 500 at the Wednesday evening celebration. The mood was upbeat. There were reports of new orders from Asia as well as the Americas, and news of increasing business from the show floor. IPC membership was up in all its regions to more than 4,000.

Doug Pauls, principal materials and process engineer, Rockwell Collins, was honored with the IPC Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame Award. Gary Ferrari, FTG, well known and awarded leader in circuit board design circles, standards development, and a former TAEC chairman, received the Dieter Bergmann Fellowship Award. Gary named the University of Connecticut (UCONN) as the recipient of the Award’s scholarship. UCONN is a member of the public/private consortia NextFlex.

Cao Xi, technical director at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. was elected as a new Board of Directors member. He is the first from his country to hold this post. China now has more than 800 IPC members, greatly attributable to the work of Dr. Philip Carmichael, President of IPC China.

Additive manufacturing got a lot of attention at the show as did robotics. The BotFactory’s desktop Squink, hidden in a small booth with a price of just a “few” Gs, garnered a lot of attention. Founded in 2013, the company developed a variety of desktop models which can be used to print conductors, insulators, solder paste and a host of other items for prototyping or repair.

Jeff Timms, ASM’s Americas managing director enthusiastically stated that his booth had more than 750 visitors during the first two days! He also stated that business was improving. KohYoung’s booth ran countless demonstrations throughout the show. Dr. Koh, President and CEO, seemed pleased with the apparent upturn and outlook in America. Technica’s President FrankMedina enthusiastically demonstrated DEK’s new “affordable” printer.

The IPC’s programs for PCB members appeared to be re-energized. Mike Carano’s “Advanced PCB Troubleshooting” professional development course drew rave reviews. The PCB Executive Forum’s program provided valuable pertinent perspectives, information and advice to the industry executives that attended. The evening dinner with the EMS members provided an additional opportunity to exchange ideas across the supply chain.

The PCB Executive Forum also generated a mystery as to why not one of the 150+ non-IPC members, who frequently complain about there not being benefits for them in the organization, did not take advantage of the program and the special 75% discount for a one-year membership offered to Forum attendees.

There were considerable concerns voiced about potential supply chain issues due to the Dow-DuPont merger. Distributors and users alike wondered which company’s products would survive and how they would be delivered and serviced. The “electronics” sales of the two “giants” are estimated to be about $5 billion of the $80+ billion of total revenue. As a reminder, the result of the merger is expected to be three separate companies: an agriculture company, a material science company, and a specialty products company. The latter would house the electronics and electronics materials businesses.

Foxconn’s chief, Terry Gou, has refused to respond to reports of the company planning to open a large LCD panel factory in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The company said that issue remains under discussion.

Liu Guohong, director of the finance and modern industry research center at the Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute, said that it is unlikely to move its manufacturing to the U.S. in the short term, Liu said, as U.S. costs are still higher than in China.

Sakai Display Products Corp., a jointly managed company of Foxconn and Sharp Corp., will start construction of a new plant in March in Guangzhou, with an initial investment of $8.88 billion.

Foxconn also established a new research center in Shenzhen last month.

Intel continued to top all other chip companies in R&D expenditures in 2016 with spending that reached $12.7 billion and represented 22.4% of its semiconductor sales last year. Intel accounted for 36% of the top-10 R&D spending and about 23% of the $56.5 billion total worldwide semiconductor R&D expenditures in 2016, according to the 20th anniversary 2017 edition of The McClean Report that was released in January 2017. Figure 1 shows IC Insights’ ranking of the top semiconductor R&D spenders based on semiconductor manufacturers and fabless suppliers with $1 billion or more spent on R&D in 2016.

Intel’s R&D spending is huge and exceeded the combined R&D spending of the next three companies on the list.

Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi Inc. announced its first in-house designed chipset. The Surge S1, deployed in Xiaomi's newest smartphone the Mi 5c, is the first chipset—which manages data flow—from the company's wholly-owned chip research subsidiary, Beijing Pinecone Electronics.

Xiaomi was briefly the world's most valuable startup following its last round of fundraising in 2014. It has since seen sales tumble due to competition from the likes of Huawei Technologies, Vivo, and Oppo.

The in-house chipset is one of a number of projects which Xiaomi hopes will bring users to its ecosystem and lower costs. Other projects include smart home devices and online banking. The company said it started developing the chipset just over two years ago, and that it is competitive with chipsets in the same range from market leader Qualcomm Inc.

Xiaomi said it has been granted over 3,600 patents, almost half of which are international. The figure includes the 1,500 patents bought from Microsoft Corp. last year.

The 47th NEPCON JAPAN was held from Jan. 18−20, 2017. Its scale with 2,250+ exhibitors was the largest-ever. The show had 110,234* visitors, which is also the largest number in its history. (*Including concurrent shows for automotive technology*, smart factory, wearables*, etc.)

*Automotive World and the 4th Wearable Expo shows each claimed Said to be the world’s largest in their categories.

DKN Research stated that it was tough navigating between the trade show booths because the aisles were full with people. It is now the vogue to have related exhibitions held concurrently. For this reason, the exhibition gets bigger each year. The following events were held simultaneously:

The East Hall expanded the floor space 30% this year to accommodate the new exhibitors. There was a major increase in space reserved for the automobile vendors. More than half the total floor space was dedicated to car electronics or related products.

The PCB section of the show was smaller this year. Many of the major circuit manufacturers did not reserve booths. Several mid-sized manufacturers introduced upgraded technologies such as MLBs with over 100 layers and MIL-certified rigid-flex. FiWLCSP and FoWLCSP have become the common technology for IC substrate suppliers. Manufacturers have developed processes to generate traces of <10 microns. Specialty chemical suppliers featured competitive solutions for the semi-additive processes capable of producing 2-micron traces. Several new circuit manufacturers from Taiwan, Mainland China and other Asian countries showed technology and quality levels on a par with Japanese companies.

Flex circuit manufacturers featured new technical concepts for stretchable circuits and transparent circuits using new substrate and conductor materials. However, the ideas for application enabled products is still in its infancy and will take a few more years to commercialize.

Companies affiliated with assembling sections were present at the show. Manufacturers for mounting machines and soldering occupied relatively large spaces, but there were fewer companies compared with last year’s show, and most of were headquartered in Japan. EMS manufactures had one company headquartered in Japan. They were happy to report their revenue topped over $1 billion dollars due to expansions in China, Vietnam and Mexico.

Business for the consumer electronics industry in Japan remains sluggish. Many electronics companies are still shaking the bushes looking for new business, especially from the automobile market. ----- Dominque Numakura.

Reports from China are that business slowed again after a brief spurt in December and January.

According to the latest IDC Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the smartphone market in China saw a 19% YoY growth and 17% QoQ growth in the 4th quarter of 2016. The market grew by 9% for the full year. The four Chinese vendors in the top five were the same as in 2015, and their share grew from 46% in 2015 to 57% in 2016.

"Increased dependence on mobile apps has led to consumers to seek phone upgrades, thus helping drive the large growth in 2016Q4. In lower-tiered cities, there was a similar demand by consumers, which OPPO and Vivo met by aggressively pushing mid-range smartphones in these cities," said Tay Xiaohan, Senior Market Analyst with IDC Asia/Pacific's Client Devices team.

Here’s a quick view of what to expect from the China smartphone market in 2017:

Chinese vendors will continue to focus on their international expansion plans. At present, out of the top three Chinese vendors in China, Huawei is the most successful with half of its shipments coming from markets outside China in 2016Q4. We expect these vendors to increase their shipments in the international market, with India as a key target for these top Chinese vendors.

Chinese vendors are starting to launch phones with dual cameras and curved screens. We expect that to be the norm for most flagships in 2017. Cameras will continue to be a key focus in the marketing messages by vendors especially given the strong selfie culture in China, as exemplified by the popularity of apps such as Meitu.